The Commercialisation of Pride

One of the main issues that Free Pride has been set up to protest is the commercialisation of Pride. Pride is for LGBTQIA+ people. It is not for corporations to make themselves look LGBT friendly and make profit off us. Commercial forces are at work in Pride events all around the world, and we need to bring this to an end.

Earlier this year the founder of the website Project Queer made a pie chart showing the groups who were registered to march at this year’s Chicago Pride. His graph shows there were 132 floats or parade slots held by corporations, compared to just 11 held by LGBTQ groups, 5 by groups related to queer people of colour, 1 by a bisexual group, and 1 by a trans group. The representation of trans people at a Pride event should never be equal to or less than the representation of Starbucks.

“Acceptance is very, very in these days. And while many take heart to see rainbows and glitter across their favorite brands, some LGBTQ-rights advocates are increasingly divided over whether that’s unequivocally a good thing—particularly if it’s coming at the expense of the radical politics that characterized the Stonewall Riots that birthed the modern pride movement.”

If a pie chart was made of your local Pride march, would it fare better than Chicago’s?